Blackstone's Bride (25 page)

Chapter Two

Daventry Hall stood on a low rise with a wide view of surrounding woods and fields, still bleak and bare in March. An arched bridge over a smooth-flowing blue river led to a curving drive. Four stories of warm golden stone rose with the stern and stately symmetry of an earlier century to a series of flat roofs with nearly a dozen small towers domed with copper cupolas blue-tinted with age. Hundreds of windows caught the afternoon light.

Emma saw at once that the house had no defenses to keep out an army. Apparently the English believed themselves protected from attack by their little ribbon of choppy sea over which a man could easily row. The house’s only defense was its unobstructed view. A spy could not escape undetected in such an open setting.

The gig from the inn rocked to stop under a two-story porch that projected from the main house. Its weathered stones, carved and ornamented with columns and tracery, gave the impression of a hundred staring eyes. Emma was glad to step inside.

When she explained that she was expected for an interview, a cheerful manservant in a plain brown suit led her up a stairway dark with heavy old timbers to an ancient stone chapel. Entering its shadowy vaulted nave, she experienced a moment of confusion.

On Sundays when their jailers took them to chapel, she and Tatty had counted the painted cherubs on the ceiling with their tiny fluttering wings, peeping around clouds or dangling their bare feet over the architecture. Here the ceiling had apparently crumbled with age, dumping frescoed cherubs onto the floor. She looked down to see sturdy fallen angels lying tangled on one another, round limbs protruding from snowy linen, rosy cheeks and tumbled curls in a jumble.

At her footfall on the stone, the heap of angels stirred.

A midsized angel opened one blue eye and peered up at her. “’Oo the devil are you?” he asked with a surprisingly earthly accent.

His words prompted other angels to stir and scramble to their feet in a row. Emma counted seven earthbound angels, staring openly at her. They came thin and round, dark and light, rough-hewn like carved figures, or rounded with curls about their rosy cheeks, not angels after all, but barefoot boys in white shirts and gray wool breeches. One last angel lay on the stone floor. He was no cherub.

A thin lawn shirt, open at the throat, clung to a powerful chest and shoulders. One sleeve was sheered off completely, exposing a gleaming muscled arm like living marble, and a lean hand gripping a great sword. The words of a childhood prayer—
archangel defend us
—rose to her lips.

The warrior angel rolled to his bare feet in a fluid move, tall and lithe and fierce. His shirt billowed about him. Charcoal wool trousers hugged his lean hips and legs. He took Emma’s breath. Angels such as he had fought each other for the heavens with fiery swords when Lucifer revolted.

His bold gaze met Emma’s and held.

“I came about the position,” she told the angel. She had no idea what his place on the household staff was, but the boys around him must be her intended pupils.

He leaned his folded arms on the hilt of his great sword and regarded her with frank interest, a sardonic lift to one brow. “I don’t remember advertising for anyone with your qualifications.”

“I beg your pardon.
You
placed the notice in the paper?”

“
You
are hardly the expected result.”

Emma blinked. “
You
are Daventry?”

“None other.” He bowed slightly. “You are E. Portland?”

Emma tried to pull her wits together. She was talking to a man, not an angel, a dangerous man who was hard to kill. She found herself babbling her qualifications, real and false. “Emma Portland. I speak French, German, and Italian. I know Latin, maths, and geography. Do you wish to see my credentials?”

“Can you teach?”

“Of course.”

“Let’s find out.” With an effortless sweep of his bare arm, he brandished the sword in the air. Emma retreated a step before she realized the sword was made of wood. “To the schoolroom, lads.”

The ragged cherubs erupted into motion and noise, surging around her. In a blink they had snatched her reticule and letters of reference and whisked them away. She could see her bag bobbing from hand to hand above their heads as they disappeared up the dark, narrow stair.

“After you, Miss Portland.” The warlike angel lord, whatever he was, grinned at her discomposure. It was not a good start. Her escape plan was not in place. She could not go back to Aubrey’s man at the inn. She needed this man to hire her, not to mock her.

* * *

The girl turned an assessing gaze on the schoolroom. Dav had held no proper lessons there since his old tutor Hodge had left. The books he’d purchased for the boys lay in a heap in one corner. Their slates were scattered about the floor. He had continued to read to them a tale of exploring the great pharaohs’ tombs. The result of that tale dominated the room—a dark pyramid built of desks and chairs that nearly reached the ceiling. A tunnel led to the interior of the structure, where the boys had disappeared.

Dav doubted she would last the afternoon, and a stab of disappointment accompanied the thought. He needed someone to take charge of the boys. They could not play games forever as if time would stand still for perpetual youth. But his idea of a tutor was nothing like this girl. From the letter he’d received, he had expected E. Portland to be a shabby scholar with his mind on the ancients. He should have told her at once that she wouldn’t do for the job and arranged her escort back to wherever she came from. Even now he should stop her before his band ate her for luncheon, but it would only be polite to offer tea before he sent her away.

He righted a chair in the back of the room, straddled it, and waited to see what she would do. The sword had startled her, but now she ignored him, her brow puckered in a little frown of concentration, as she removed her plain black bonnet and gloves. She was thinking, stalling for time, he suspected.

Her hair, gold as sunbeams and springy as waves, was pulled back from her face with only a few curls escaping. A part of him just wanted to look at her. She undid the strings of her cloak. He hadn’t seen the style, but he recognized an old, secondhand garment when he saw it, like the velvet coat he had in his wardrobe, a garment with a past. The cloth was faded rose wool, and the collar had a fringe like the petals of a wilted rose. Her gesture in removing it spoke of pride even when necessity made one bow.

He imagined helping her undo it, a missed opportunity. Gentlemen did such things, didn’t they? And he was a gentleman now. The courts had made him one in spite of his grandfather’s opposition. Daventry. He’d actually said the name rather easily.

Under her cloak she wore a dove gray muslin gown, too loose for her light figure. An overdress of pale sky blue closed under her bosom and gave some shape to the gown. Her eyes were vivid against that blue. Something about the dignity of her bearing had made him expect elegance, and not a woman in a secondhand gown applying for a humble household post. The upward tilt of her chin with its slight dent seemed regal, a dent made for a man’s thumb.

Inside the pyramid, the boys squirmed and positioned themselves to spy on her. At any moment he expected them to erupt from their hiding place with wild whoops. He prepared himself to step in and put a comforting arm around her shoulder. If she sensed the boys meant mischief, she didn’t show it. She circled the pyramid, collecting slates and pencils and stacking them on a chair facing the dark entrance.

When the room grew quiet, she stopped and touched the pocket of her gown, as if she had something tucked there. He smiled to himself. If she had something there, a good luck talisman perhaps, and still possessed it, the lads had lost their touch. Lark and Rook could lift the feathers from a strutting cock, and he’d not miss them.

Her gown fell back in its near-shapeless line, and she folded one hand over the other, a gesture of perfect self-containment. It irked him. He felt his fists tighten on the sword and his jaw clench that she should be an expert at retreating into herself. It spoke of a past about which he wanted to know nothing.

Her voice, low and sweet and surprising in its authority, interrupted the thought. “Once upon a time,” she began.

He did not know the story. It was like the old stories he had heard as a child, but unfamiliar, too. He doubted it was English at all. A part of him believed she was making it up on the spot, or at least altering it to suit her audience, for there were seven sons of a poor woodcutter and his wife who had no more money. The wife took a threadbare cloth and wrapped it around the last of the bread, and they sent their two oldest sons out into the world.

Dav thought he could listen to her voice if she talked about laundry, and he certainly did not mind looking at her. The story continued with the journey of the woodcutter’s sons.

“Off they went down the road, and passed men working in the fields, and building a great church, and selling goods, but no one offered them work. As they sat at noon to eat their bread, a flock of little brown birds landed in the branches above and hopped about their feet. The birds chirped and chirped.”

Here the storyteller paused and wrote upon a slate, her pencil making a birdlike cheep. She put the slate aside and resumed the tale of the hungry boys, who ate and went their way, leaving the empty cloth but not a crumb for the birds. As the sun was setting, they met an ogre, and the storyteller lowered her voice to a gruff growl. “‘What do you have to say for yourselves?’

“When the woodcutter’s sons replied, ‘Nothing,’ the ogre said, ‘Then you’d best come work for me.’ He led them to his house at the edge of a wood and opened an oaken door crossed with iron bars. ‘In here,’ he invited. The boys stepped forward, and he shoved them down stone steps and locked them in darkness black as pitch.”

In the way of such stories the second pair of sons met the same fate as the first. They, too, waved away the birds and left behind their mother’s scrap of cloth but shared no crumbs. Again the girl wrote on the slates. Again the woodcutter’s sons had nothing to say for themselves when questioned by the ogre, and down into the cellar they went.

She paused, and the room held its breath. Her gaze didn’t waver, but Dav felt her awareness of him. He had tightened his grip on his sword. She told the story as if she knew just what it was to be locked in that fairy-tale cellar, and she made him feel it, too, his heart beating in his chest. When she began again, his hands relaxed.

“At last the woodcutter and his wife were so hungry they sent their youngest sons out into the world with bread tied in neat bundles. These three passed the men in the fields, the church builders, and the busy market, but no one offered them a job. Hungry and weary they sat on a log to eat their bread. When a flock of birds flew near, the youngest said to his brothers, ‘Listen, the birds want to speak.’ He held out his hand with crumbs upon it. A bird hopped down at once and pecked them up. And when the three brothers rose to go on their way, they brushed the remaining crumbs onto the ground for the flock.”

This time when she paused, Dav knew that she had reached the turning point. Now the brothers would get it right. Kindness, that was the point of the story, he felt sure, an easy moral lesson and there an end. He felt disappointed.

Her concentration was perfect. She seemed so caught up in the world of the story that she did not notice rustlings and whispers from inside the pyramid.

Consciousness of her femaleness thrummed in him like the low vibration of some powerful machine. Her gown seemed insubstantial, like cloud or water, loosely clinging to her form. He liked the look of her springy golden hair that might escape its bonds and her wide blue eyes and the way she wavered between trembling courage and contained purpose. He put her age at twenty or so. It occurred to him that she would have to be a prodigy to have the scholar’s knowledge of languages and maps and math she claimed to have.

“The last three of the woodcutter’s sons soon met the ogre, who asked them, ‘What do you have to say for yourselves?’

“The youngest opened his mouth to answer when the flock of birds flew round and set up such a din of beating wings and chirping that a person could not hear himself think. The ogre shouted and waved and drove the flock to the rooftop except one bird who settled on the shoulder of the youngest son and chirped in his ear.”

The girl stopped speaking and put down the slate in her hands. Her voice dropped as if she had come to the last words of the tale. Dav could sense the edge of anticipation in the boys. She stood contained and cool, unmoved by the tension of the unfinished story.

“Well, wot ’appens?” came a voice from within the pyramid. Slaps, grunts, and rustling hushed the speaker. Someone whispered, “Let ’er finish it.”

Dav did not know whether to be amused or annoyed that she had engaged him in this test of patience. She had violated the fundamental rule of storytelling by leaving the woodcutter’s sons trapped in the ogre’s cellar and her audience unsatisfied.

He could call a halt to the lesson and thank her, but if he did so, he, too, would not know the story’s end.

He was sure the boys could see her, but she gave no sign of impatience. Again there was movement in the pyramid, and Robin, at eight, the baby of the band, poked his blond head out of the tunnel. “Please, miss, are you going to say wot ’appens?”

In a flash Dav realized the unfinished story had been her strategy all along. But she showed no sign of triumph at this first victory. She was patient, Dav would give her that.

“Only you can finish the story.”

Robin crawled out and sat at her feet. Savage whispers hissed at him from the tunnel. “’Ow can we finish yer story?”

She looked as solemn as the little boy. “Each must answer the ogre’s question.”

“’Ow do we know wot to answer?”

Swallow’s head emerged. “Robin, ye nodcock, it’s wot the birds say, isn’t it?”

The girl handed Robin a slate. “I’ve written their words for you on these slates. There’s a word for each to tell the ogre.”